Theora Development Continues Apace, VP8 Now Open Source

SergeyKurdakov writes "Monty 'xiphmont' Montgomery of the Xiph Foundation says the latest action-packed, graph- and demo-clip-stuffed Theora project update page (demo 9) is now up for all and sundry! Catch up on what's gone into the new Theora encoder Ptalarbvorm over the last few months. It also instructs how to pronounce 'Ptalarbvorm.' Ptalarbvorm is not a finished release encoder yet, though I've personally been using it in production for a few months. Pace on improvements hasn't slowed down — the subjective psychovisual work being done by Tim Terriberry and Greg Maxwell has at least doubled-again on the improvements made by Thusnelda, and they're not anywhere near done yet. As a bonus Monty gathered all Xiph demo pages in one place." Also on the video codec front, and also with a Xiph connection, atamido writes "Google has released On2's VP8 video codec to the world, royalty-free. It is packaging it with Vorbis audio, in a subset of the Matroska container, and calling it WebM. It's not branded as an exclusively Google project — Mozilla and Opera are also contributors. Builds of your favorite browsers with full support are available." An anonymous reader points out this technical analysis of VP8.

Comments

Re:Namefail

[Captain Spam]

As obtuse as PCMCIA and SCSI are as names, they're far easier to recognize at a glance (even if SCSI's pronunciation became "scuzzy", which probably isn't what they had in mind when they made the acronym) than Pfnartlekaboom, or however it's supposed to be pronounced. The consumer world really, REALLY doesn't want to have to read a pronunciation guide just to figure out how to say it, let alone take advanced classes just to spell it. If Phunklezoom as a technology catches on, I can assure you the common name will become "Vorm" or something similar within a month.

And I don't think 802.3, the IEEE standard for the physical and link layers, ever really gained name recognition in the not-geek consumer world (CAT-5, 10baseT, 100baseT, all yes, 802.3, not so much).

Of course, H.264 is also a pretty lame name...